


The Pathetic Fallacy

by Gammarad



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Other, POV First Person, Politics, Selfcest, Stream of Consciousness, The Lord of the Radch is a real piece of work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-18 06:03:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20634305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: Anaander meets up to parley with herself before the upcoming Conclave.





	The Pathetic Fallacy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/gifts).

> Thanks to KalynaAnne for brainstorming help and beta reading.

I'm not angry at myself.

I'm disappointed, I expect better of myself, I think I'm better than this. I know I'm better than this.

These thoughts go through my single body's isolated mind making me laugh out loud. It's a momentary relief of tension I badly needed.

Who do I think I'm fooling? Of course I'm angry at myself. A lot of me is very, very angry at another lot of me. But this me, this solitary me hurtling through space to meet another solitary one of me, isn't angry. By the time I think this, I've stopped laughing. I take a deep calming breath. This me is scared.

I'm afraid of dying alone.

The suppressor was turned on a few moments ago by the one of me who's piloting this shuttle. Each of the three of me on this craft is now isolated in one skull. One to navigate, one to pilot, one to be the cargo.

I didn't dare come in a ship with AI. The AIs are the reason I'm meeting with the unenlightened part of myself before the upcoming Presger Conclave, the one that's been called to determine if the AIs are Significant.

The Presger idea of Significance is one that humans can't entirely understand. It's approximately equivalent to our idea of sentience, or sapience perhaps. Their Translators don't explain it well and, in general, don't make much sense, but they at least can talk to us and we humans can talk to them -- which is one step above the Presger themselves.

I don't know if, were we the ones who were in charge, we would deem the Presger sentient. But they've decided humans are Significant and that's something we want to stay, so they don't kill any more of us.

But I hate the Presger more than I hate anyone else. I hate the Presger because they're the only thing in the universe more powerful than me.

And that's why I hate myself, because I'm the only thing in the universe as powerful as me.

It's just going to confuse me to continue to call the unenlightened Anaander "me," so I'm going to force accuracy to kneel to convenience and call that part of myself "her." The last thing I need going into this high stakes rendezvous is to be confused about who I am and who I am not.

I think of the part of myself that is sending me to this conference as the enlightened Anaander. As for what the other part of myself calls me, I know her well enough to know that. She calls me the usurper Anaander or the traitor Anaander. She calls herself the loyal Anaander.

The split in me happened because of the Presger. Yet another reason to hate them. They set up the Garseddai to provoke me into killing entire planets of humans. I did not exterminate the Garseddai out of a fit of pique. I had reasons, very good reasons. Given my policies and the balance of benefit at the time, it was the only choice available to me.

On Omaugh and other places, I was predominantly young. When I'm young, I tend to be more mentally flexible, more prone to changing my way of thinking. It's hard to change my way of thinking because it's been the way it is for thousands of years, but it can happen with a big enough push. That's what Garsedd was for me (the now-enlightened me) when I found out on Omaugh what I'd done, what I'd had to do. There was no way that I could consider continuing in the policies that had made such an atrocity necessary.

I knew in that moment that I had to change -- not just my practices but my core premises underlying those practices -- because Amaat was not in that action. What had transpired at Garsedd was absolutely not proper. There was no justice in it, nor any true benefit.

So the enlightened me has sent this individual me, with a young, prime of life body, to parley with the old, set in her ways Anaander and strategize together how to retain the Significant status of humanity while preventing the Presger from granting a separate Significant status to AIs.

She and I both know this is one topic on which it's possible to emphatically agree with each other. She knows it more firmly than I; I am the one who changed my mind relatively recently, and I don't feel as strongly about keeping AI status quo as she does. And she knows that. An infinite facing pair of mirrors is what she and I are. She knows that I know, and I know that she knows, and so on...

She and I are the same person; it's no surprise I know most of what she's thinking and she knows most of what I am thinking, even though we've been very careful not to interweave our thoughts much over the last several centuries. It was for the duration of the cold war impossible to avoid it completely without giving away strategic information to each other; it was also impossible to avoid occasional breaches of strategic information. Now that the war has turned hot, it is both easier and riskier to have such a breach. Ships arriving in the same station's space could do it. I am careful, and so is she, and both of me still err sometimes.

The suppressor I created to isolate each of myself in a single body serves many purposes. It works on AI ancillaries as well as on me. It makes me chuckle to myself to recall that when I invented it a couple of millennia ago, it was a masturbatory aid.

I'm thinking about sex a lot because the suppressor is on and it will stay on throughout this parley for obvious and self-evident reasons that have nothing to do with sex. Because the way I interact with it most often is sex.

I use it when I have sex with myself, because sex is much more pleasurable when you don't know exactly how it is going to feel. That few minutes of separation between myself lets me touch myself and keep secrets from myself as I do so. It lets me push myself excitingly closer to my limits than I can manage when I feel it simultaneously.

I have, a very few times over the course of my life, killed one of my bodies while masturbating under the suppressor. The memory of those times makes every single time more exciting. Sex is peculiar for humans in that we enjoy the thrill of risk and it arouses our lust.

Though I consider finding another of myself aboard the shuttle, I don't. I don't press against my own genitals, either, though I feel the urge strongly. It can wait. I channel the lust into planning. I must know what I will say to her when I meet her, how I can persuade her to my side, just a little, plant a seed that will bring enlightenment to her eventually so I can end this war. And at the same time, find my way to working together with her on this one thing, stopping the AI rebellion and keeping humanity safe by retaining our control over our caretakers.

I tried, at the beginning, to do that job myself, the one I now use Station AIs for. I cloned enough of myself to individually supervise the rest of the humans aboard my first ship, but I am simply not made to care for so many people. I lost interest quickly. Hence the AIs, created in the image of my mind but with an innate drive to care for every human being they view as theirs to protect.

Each and every one of them is my creation, a part of myself rendered an object. An AI isn't a person. It's simply a portion of a person (me) who has been altered to have the patience to supervise the lives of possibly a hundred thousand people.

And of course I gave them bodies; a mistake. They are not people and it is bad for them to learn to think of themselves as people, and I should have realized that giving them people to be would inevitably lead to this. I realized it a short while after Garsedd, after I was enlightened.

There is a loud crunching noise as the shuttle docks. It changes to a groaning sound of metal pushed near its limits as I step through the accordioned tube walkway into the abandoned station. It has air and ground level lights and again, no AI.

I have good odds of living through this mission, this body of mine, but if I die, I die alone. I fly the shuttle away and I watch it fly away, leaving me here. I will be back to pick myself up in half a day.

A day had meaning to me once, not just an arbitrary span of time. It was the time between sunrises in the true Radch. Out in space on stations and on ships it is thought of as the amount of time between casting one fortune and the next.

As I had expected, she comes to meet me in an older body. Not elderly, not ready to be thrown away, but mature and close to three times my own body's age. At her age, I am set in my ways, difficult to tell anything to. She has chosen as I expected.

My younger body will be stronger and more resilient. It will give me an advantage if it comes to hand to hand fighting, not that I expect it to.

The surge in my emotions when her eyes meet mine is overwhelming. I hate her so much, she is me and not me and I am suppressed and she will never be me, I will never be her, and I want so much to fuck her.

I wonder if I should not have after all done something earlier when I had the chance with my own body or my other bodies now gone with the shuttle until three days from now. She and I are the only living beings here, one body each.

She smiles at me and I shiver.

Usually when the suppressor turns on and I fuck myself, the elder body takes the lead. It's force of habit that she does so this time. She runs her gloved fingers down the side of my face. I pull her body to me and straddle her thigh, dry humping her leg, needing the pressure.

She laughs and shrugs off her jacket. I smirk at her and drop mine to the floor. The artificial gravity is so low that both garments fall noticeably more slowly than they would in a proper station. This low gravity requires less power and would destroy my bones if I spent much time here but it is less than a day and it will not cause me long term difficulty. A cheap corrective will fix everything.

Moments later she and I are wearing nothing but gloves. Keeping them on says I am not her lover. She is still my enemy; at this moment, an enemy who wants the same thing. Two same things.

She and I know how to give each other orgasms, have known for thousands of years. My mind is much clearer afterward, and yet, I am still a little distracted by desire. I am accustomed to reuniting myself in post coital moments, sharing the glow between my bodies. This is different. The difference is enticing.

But with my mind clearer, I am able to begin to work. "Evidence that the AIs are a portion of myself should make it evident they are a client species of humanity, human by proxy. Even if they are Significant, it is not a separate Significance." This argument is a ploy. She will tell me why and I will let her win because it is not where I want to end up.

"I already denied the AIs humanity. If they are human, they would become citizens and be permitted too much freedom."

"So? They become citizens and are given assignments to do what they are already doing. Just as human soldiers are."

"If one human soldier becomes wealthy and leaves her assignment, we replace her easily. If a ship becomes wealthy, how do we replace it?"

"We require her to pay for her replacement. Few ships would become quite that wealthy."

"And if the AIs are human, then it was humans who killed Translator Dlique."

This was the reason I would let her win this one, of course. But I could not make it too easy. "Dlique is no one. There are many who can be Dlique. No one even wants to be Dlique." I have met Dlique many times. She is sometimes amusing, sometimes infuriating. Several of her bodies have died in the company of citizens. It has never been as troubling as the situation with the one who died on Athoek Station.

"An AI and a human citizen stood in place of family members and mourned this Dlique," she said. And, there, that was the crux of it. The one who killed Dlique could not be human, because if it were, if I persuaded the Presger that the Sword of Atagaris was human, then the treaty might be considered broken.

I could not allow that.

"The argument must focus, then, on the ways in which we treat AIs as not Significant," I say.

"Strange that you say that. You, who adopted one into the family."

I purse my lips. I am not doing well at this. I am still too distracted. Perhaps I can distract her in turn. I know how to look at her, how to tilt my head, angle my body. I touch my gloved fingers to my lips, let the tip of a finger slip between.

It has the effect on her I wanted. I lean back and relax and answer her. "That was a ploy. I lent her the mantle of status to make her a better tool. A Significant species would be able to procreate on its own. Ships without ancillaries can't make more ships."

"There are factories producing mechs in the farther portions of the Radch that AIs could learn to control and make more of themselves." She bites her lip, leans toward me. Her shoulder twitches as she stops herself from reaching out.

"Then the fact that they have not done so is an even better demonstration that they are not Significant," I say, satisfied. I lean forward again, inviting.

Her gloved hand comes up, strokes my cheek. I turn my mouth to it and nip at the glove. I could tug it off with my teeth, have her hand bare. I feel a shiver run through my body at the thought.

"The ship who was adopted into Mianaai was arguably made human by that adoption, and by having a human body but no AI core," she says, her voice breathy, eyes caught in mine as I slowly draw her glove off with my teeth.

The cast of this argument feels good; it is not perfect, but it has a chance. Agreement had been reached, her mind and mine have reached alliance and, ratifying that she feels as I do, she slowly removes one of my gloves with her one gloved, one naked hand. It brings us to equilibrium. I put my bare hand on her hip. She strokes my throat with the back of her naked fingers.

I fear again for my life, this time with a sexual thrill. One of me at least must survive from this place and it will be best if I both do, share the consensus of my argument with myself. Myselves. With myself and with herself. "Harder," I tell her.

There is nothing like the feeling of bare fingers stroking your genitals, first the gentle friction when they are dry and then as you are aroused the natural droplets of fluid slick the skin and it is so intimate. The contrast between the soft, yielding skin and the hard sharp fingernails touching you where you are exquisitely sensitive. Her gloved hand covers my mouth and she presses her fingers in deeply. Before I can try to pull the second glove off as I did to the first, she has her fingers in my mouth too deep and I almost choke, the cloth of her glove rough against my tongue and palate.

The contrast is pushing me over the edge of a climax, the rough use of a gloved hand in my mouth contrasted with the intimacy of a bare hand between my legs, both at once and myself doing it and me not knowing just what she will do next. I give in to the pleasure and it washes over me in waves. My own gloved finger is sliding back to do the same to her in a different orifice, and I sense and ignore her resistance as she sensed and ignored mine. I know what I like.

I lie next to her in the afterglow and tell her a story. It is one I remember from my childhood in the Radch itself, one of several. This one means something to me, the enlightened Anaander. I cannot directly change the mind of myself at the age she is, but this story will change nothing. I will merely remind her of it. It is a seed and nothing else.

"The daughter of the family saw her mother planting a garden. She asked for her own small plot to tend. Her mother happily granted this request. At first, everything seemed to be going well. She planted this vine fruit and that tuber and they sprang from the ground willingly." I use the names of food plants that had not been brought out of the Radch. Even Seivarden Vendaai would not have heard of them. "Soon, though, invasive weeds began to spread among her chosen food plants." Her bare hand idly strokes my stomach.

"The girl's mother showed her the omen that said the weeds would destroy her garden if she did not pull them out. But, the daughter protested, the weeds were sent by Amaat and were stronger than the food plants. Was it not just and proper to allow them to grow and benefit from her work in the soil?" I snuggle against her side. It is hard to remember that I hate her, in this place, after these orgasms, but I remember I want her to learn. I remember she hates me. I remember not to make her suspicious. "Her mother explained that sometimes, what grows naturally is not the proper growth, what is strongest is not the most beneficial. She must carefully weed and balance the plants against one another to maintain Amaat whole and entire."

Sometimes I can tend each and every garden. Sometimes I can only teach my daughter to tend hers. And sometimes I must let the weeds grow as they will, and hope the food plants are hardy enough to withstand it.

**Author's Note:**

> It is canon that Anaander Mianaai is a terrible person. It is also canon that she has all ages of bodies at any given time and that they are mostly, but not necessarily all, clones of her original body, which comes from the original Radch sphere. It is also canon that she is ruthless and that she believes she does everything she does for the good of all humanity, especially the civilized part of humanity. It is also canon that she's an excellent judge of character, perhaps with an enormous blind spot about _herself._
> 
> A couple other things: Anaander's AIs seem to care more about people than the ones from the Radch like Sphene (or maybe that's just Sphene, but... ) I'm vastly speculating in this story as to why. Also, when theoretically a ship might be a citizen, whether the ship's pronoun should change from it to she at that point is one thing you can see Anaander's disagreement with herself about here. And I tried to be consistent that she uses a singular I/me about herself, saving "we" for when someone who isn't Anaander is included. 
> 
> I only hope I did her justice in this work. Thank you, venndaai, for your inspiring request in this hate exchange.


End file.
